On the Alleged Illusion of Conscious Will

Abstract

The belief that conscious will is merely “an illusion created by the brain” appears to be gaining in popularity among cognitive neuroscientists. Its main adherents usually refer to the classic, but controversial ‘Libet-experiments’, as the empirical evidence that vindicates this illusion-claim. However, based on recent work that provides other interpretations of the Libet-experiments, we argue that the illusion-claim is not only empirically invalid, but also theoretically incoherent, as it is rooted in a category mistake; namely, the presupposition that neuronal activity causes conscious will. We show that the illusion-claim is based on the behaviorist ‘input-output’ paradigm, and discuss the notions of ‘self-organization’ and ‘self-steering’ to provide an alternative perspective on the causal efficacy of conscious will. In the final sections, a tentative theoretical picture is sketched of conscious will as an instance of self-steered self-organization. We conclude that the subjective experience of conscious will is not a misguided one, but rather that the mechanisms supporting conscious will are considerably more complex than mainstream cognitive neuroscience currently acknowledges.

Keywords:

• Conscious Will
• Benjamin Libet
• Self-Organization

Acknowledgments

We thank William Bechtel, two anonymous reviewers, Fred Keijzer, Daan Franken, Jaap Bax, and all PCCP-members for their helpful comments and suggestions. This work is supported by NWO-VIDI research-grant no. 016.038.301.

Notes

Notes

[1] Other relatively well-known examples of self-organization include (1) the hexagonal Rayleigh-Bénard cells, characteristic convection rolls that form in uniformly heated liquids (Jantsch, 1980), and (2) the Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction, a complex, prolonged chemical reaction.

[2] Not all forms of self-organization lead to macroscopic order that displays novel so-called “emergent” system properties.

[3] In modern philosophy of mind, there is still much discussion over the question of whether or not neuronal phenomena and psychological ones are really part of different levels (e.g., Kim, 1998). A view along these lines can be found in Keijzer and Schouten (2005).

[4] The relation between self-organization and ‘levels’ is not a straightforward one. Not all macroscopic properties of self-organizing systems are generally regarded as being part of a new level of description.